To the east of the famous Isis temple on the island of Philae in Upper Egypt, workers and archaeologists are busy at work. They are cleaning and restoring the massive stone blocks that once formed the temple of Hathor, which is being rebuilt and restored in order to be officially inaugurated next month.

Time has since taken its toll on the temple, which was built by King Ptolemy VI and extended during the reigns of Ptolemy VII and Roman emperors Augustus and Tiberius. Many of the temple's stone blocks have deteriorated; its walls, meanwhile, are riddled with cracks.

There is an area out in the desert behind the Step Pyramid where the Sakkara Antiquities people dump their dig debris. This is an interesting place to ride as there are bits of ancient mudbrick, old bones, bits of pottery and so on. However, lately they have also been dumping basic garbage out there and that is NOT ok. 

La excavación aporta datos hasta ahora desconocidos de este personaje, como que la tumba podría haberse utilizado “como un lugar sagrado donde se conmemoraba la memoria del visir”. La tercera y última de las jornadas de Egiptología organizadas por la Fundación Gaselec y que se han venido celebrando desde el pasado miércoles dejaron entrever la posibilidad de que parte de la historia de una época muy concreta pueda sufrir grandes cambios.

Así al menos lo expresó el conferenciante de ayer, Francisco Martín-Valentín, quien junto a Teresa Bedman dirigen la campaña de excavaciones en la tumba nº 28 de Asasif (Luxor Occidental), correspondiente al visir Amen-Hotep Huy.

Manchester Museum has a unique collection of objects connected with pyramid building. Many everyday tools have survived from a settlement specially-planned to house workers who built the pyramid of King Senwosret II (c. 1880-1874 BC).

In ancient times the town was called Hetep-Senwosret (‘Senwosret-is-pleased’ or ‘Senwosret-is-satisfied’). Today the town is known as Kahun, the name given to it by the site’s excavator W.M.F. Petrie (1853-1942 AD) after hearing the name from a local man. The whole site, including the king’s pyramid, its associated temples and other tombs, is more commonly called Lahun. It is situated at the eastern edge of the Faiyum region – an area of major building works in the Middle Kingdom (c. 2055-1650 BC).

The pyramid was built upon a natural outcrop of limestone, of over 12 metres in height. An internal framework of limestone walls was built to form a structural skeleton.

The Lady Tentdinebu reclines in a corner room of the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin. Her brilliantly coloured encasement tells us she once lived in ancient Egypt. When she died around 800 BC in Thebes, her body was preserved for the afterlife. Today you can admire the texts and religious imagery decorating her mummified body.

Such mummies are providing modern science with a view into their ancient world. Modern imaging techniques allowed experts to suggest famed Tutankhamun died of malaria (about 1,324 BC). And medical scans show diseases such as atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) were common among ancient Egyptians; even cancer has been detected.

The National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh is running a special exhibition, Fascinating Mummies, until May 27th, which focuses on what scientists today can tell us about ancient Egypt.

Egyptology and antiquity fans won't want to miss this displayed collection of precious treasures in Paris.

A jewel-box mansion in the middle of Paris holds a surprising exhibition that brings together, for the first time ever, precious treasures from the last period of the Egyptian Pharaonic dynasties.

It was here we met visiting Americans cruising through Paris on the Seine [available with Viking River Cruises, AmaWaterways and CroisiEurope, to name a few].  They used a tour day in Paris to visit the exhibition.

“The Twilight of the Pharaohs, Masterpieces from the last Egyptian Dynasties”, is an assortment of the world’s finest sculptures, reliefs, sarcophagi, death masks, items of worship and jewelry from tombs and temples.

It also refutes the previously accepted academic assumption that there was a decline in the artistic output at the end of the Egyptian Pharaonic dynasties.

“O Egypt, Egypt, of your pious deeds only stories will survive, and they will be incredible to your children.” Ian Moyer’s book is a first-rate analysis of the relationship between Egypt and Hellenism; it moves significantly beyond the historical positivism, the binary framework of Greek/barbarian, and the colonialist assumptions of older scholarship. Moyer considers four sources closely—Herodotus, Manetho, the Delian Sarapis aretalogy, and Thessalus (who composed a treatise De virtutibus herbarumin the first or second century CE)—to each of which he devotes a chapter. The book is ostensibly about meetings between Greeks and Egyptian priests, the latter group typified by the figure who looks “mysterious and austere, dressed in white linen, head shaved, wise in the ways of magic and divination… known since Herodotus as a fount of ancient wisdom”. But the device is a launching-point for a series of investigations into the encounters of Egyptians and Greeks over many centuries. Moyer is a learned and skilled reader of the texts, and there is much to hail in the publication of this erudite, sophisticated, and thoughtful volume.

Moyer is sensitive to the history of scholarship on his topic and he elucidates its politics with acuity, but is nonetheless wary, and weary, of talking about Black Athena; his own book tries to shift discussion away from questions of influence to interaction.

Right from the start of this pocket sized book by Harry Powers the author appears to be a bit of a pessimist as his journey takes him to Egypt for of Madeira the author says " the thoughtful traveller will view Madeira with mingled feelings. The shadows in the picture are due less to depravity (largely imported) than to sheer backwardness." Our guide goes on to say of Monte Carlo "It used to hide its depravity under a certain tone and elegance."

Having at last arrived in Egypt our friend Harry begins describing the things to see including Pompey's pillar of which he says "a huge and meaningless shaft of uncertain origin concerning which little is known except that it had nothing to do with Pompey."

After a "monotonous" but interesting journey to Cairo our friend tours various mosques and provides some very interesting descriptions of a few of the most important but also points out the shoddy construction and dilapidated conditions of the buildings.

The cherubic-faced baby sits frozen in eternal repose, arms crossed on its knees, trimmed hair, tiny fingernails and a small amulet around its neck.

Researchers don't know the infant's gender, but they believe the baby's battle for life ended at 10 months old from a heart defect. But this infant is much older than that — it's 6,420 years old to be exact.

The child is a mummified corpse from Peru known as the "Detmold Child."

It's 1,000 years older than the earliest known Egyptian mummy and predates King Tut by more than 3,000 years.

The Detmold Child is on display at "Mummies of the World, The Exhibition," which opens today and continues through Sept. 9, at Tampa's Museum of Science and Industry.

The statue of Ramesses the Great, which stood tall in front of the Pyramid for 13 years, is now greeting students on The University of Memphis campus.

The statue, a replica of the Ramesses the Great statue from Egypt, was placed on the edge of campus facing the Central parking lot Monday. Students took pictures of the statue as they walked past, and drivers took advantage of red lights, as they got a quick look of the new addition on campus.

Cleopatra's twin babies now have a face. An Italian Egyptologist has rediscovered a sculpture of Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, the offspring of Mark Antony and Cleopatra VII, at the Egyptian museum in Cairo.

Discovered in 1918 near the temple of Dendera on the west bank of the Nile, the sandstone statue was acquired by the Egyptian Museum in Cairo but has remained largely overlooked.

The back of the the 33-foot sculpture, catalogued as JE 46278 at the Egyptian museum, features some engraved stars -- likely indicating that the stone was originally part of a ceiling. Overall, the rest of the statue appears to be quite unusual.

"It shows two naked children, one male and one female, of identical size standing within the coils of two snakes. Each figure has an arm over the other’s shoulder,‭ ‬while the other hand grasps a serpent," Giuseppina Capriotti, an Egyptologist at the Italy's National Research Council, told Discovery News.

Missing fragments from the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead have been uncovered deep in the stores of the Queensland Museum.

The manuscript belonged to a high-ranking Egyptian official who lived in 1420 BC.  It was believed to contain magical spells to guide the dead to the afterlife.

Parts of the manuscript were discovered in the late 19th Century, but archaeologists have never found it all.

World-renowned Egyptologist Dr John Taylor was viewing the museum's Egyptian collection when a name on a papyrus fragment caught his eye.

Dr Taylor is the curator of the British Museum's mummy collection. The British Museum currently has a mummy exhibition on display at the Queensland Museum.

He was taken to the museum's storeroom to see more and says what came next is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery.

WHEN visiting British Museum curator John Taylor asked to inspect Queensland Museum's collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts, he did not expect to stumble upon a long-lost section of the burial scroll of one of the civilisation's greatest builders.

The world-renowned Egyptologist, in Brisbane for the opening this week of a touring exhibition of mummies from his museum, was poring over a display case of antiquities when his eye was drawn to a shred of papyrus bearing the distinctive hieroglyphs of Amenhotep, a chief builder in the 15th century BC, whose burial scroll, known as a "Book of the Dead", was scattered across the globe in the 1890s.

Intrigued by the fragment, donated in 1913 by an unknown woman, Dr Taylor asked whether there were any more pieces in the museum's dungeons.

"When I was brought into the conservation lab to see them, after a very short period of time it became apparent that we did indeed have many fragments of the Book of the Dead of this extremely important man," Dr Taylor said yesterday.
Rec Coverage 28 Day pass

"This is not the papyrus of just anybody - this is one of the top officials in Egypt at the peak of Egyptian prosperity."

A big archaeological slab dating back to the era of Ramesses III, the most famous king of the Dynasty 20 (The Modern State era) was found.

The slab shows Ramesses III while providing sacrifices and offerings to the god Amon Ra, the god of the country and the Egyptian empire at the time.

Behind him as shown in the slab, stands his famous wife goddess Amont while wearing her famous crown.

How did a Brooklyn man smuggle enough Egyptian artifacts into the U.S. to open a small museum? Mostly by lying on customs forms. On Wednesday the New York antiques dealer Mousa Khouli (aka Morris Khouli), 38, pleaded guilty to smuggling Egyptian artifacts into the country at a Brooklyn courthouse, including an ancient sarcophagus in Greco-Roman style, a three-part nesting coffin that once contained an ancient Egyptian named "Shesepamuntayesher," a set of funerary boats, and limestone figures. Khouli could face as much as 20 years in federal prison.

An antiques dealer pleaded guilty on Wednesday to smuggling ancient Egyptian treasures, including a coffin, to the United States.

Mousa Khouli, also known as Morris Khouli, aged 38, faces up to 20 years of prison for “smuggling Egyptian cultural property into the United States and making a false statement to law enforcement authorities,” the federal prosecutor's office in New York said. 

Rare Egyptian artifact dates back to the 13th century B.C.E., the era when some scholars speculate the Exodus may have occurred • Scarab bears name, in Egyptian writing, of the sun god Amon-Ra, one of Egypt's most important deities.

Just in time for Passover, Israeli archaeologists have found a rare Egyptian artifact in Jerusalem. An Egyptian scarab, dating back to the 13th century B.C.E. (the era when some scholars speculate the Exodus may have occurred) was uncovered on Thursday at an excavation sponsored by the Israel Antiquities Authority at the City of David National Park.

In the introduction (dated 1974), of the publication which William Kelly Simpson, together with Dows Dunham, dedicated to the monument, he made the following comment about the mastaba of queen Meresankh III, granddaughter of
Kheops: "The extraordinary preservation of the colors in the reliefs is one of the most attractive features of the chapel. ..... A publication of the chapel in color photography would be extremely welcome".

This mastaba of Giza, in which Meresankh had been buried, is also a witness to the importance acquired by the women of the royal family of the IVth Dynasty, in particular of the mother of Meresankh, queen Hetepheres II.

This mastaba tomb of Meresankh III can be found on OsirisNet, with complete photographic coverage.

On Monday the statue of Ramesses II will be moved from the front of The Pyramid to the University of Memphis campus.

The process will begin at 8 a.m. and will take several hours to remove it from the base and secure it on a flat-bed truck.

Once on the road, they'll travel at about 30 miles an hour to the U of M, arriving by late morning or early afternoon.

It will be installed off Central Avenue between the theater and the music buildings.

Portions of Central will blocked as the statue is placed, secured and leveled, said Ken Mulvany, the university's landscape architect.

"It will basically be an all-day process," Mulvany said. "There will be a slow cavalcade."

The bull’s head is tiny, napped from a flint core 5,650 years ago, but its horns make a beautifully sweet curve to point at one another with uncanny precision, like two curved knives. It’s astounding that it has survived so long intact, but it’s also pretty marvelous that anyone was able to chip it, with another stone, so exactly.

The bull’s head goes back more than halfway to the beginning of civilization, closer to the folks painting aurochs on cave walls than to, say, Michelangelo. And you don’t see many art exhibitions that go that far back — in fact, the “Dawn of Egyptian Art” at the Metropolitan Museum is one of the few shows in New York that ever has.

And yet even that long ago, art is already art, transforming everyday objects into symbols and artificially creating beauty. One of the most common decorated objects in this show are the flat greywacke stones used to mix cosmetics in every era.

Most of the 190 objects here are small, made of hard stone like flint or greywacke, or from ceramic, ivory or wood.

Following the end of the ancient Egyptian New Kingdom in around 1000 BCE, Egypt entered a long "late period," book-ended by the arrival of Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, during which dynasties rose and fell with bewildering frequency. Political fragmentation and various foreign invasions only exacerbated centuries of decline.

Few of the sort of magnificent temples that had marked the apogee of ancient Egyptian civilisation during the previous New Kingdom were built, and while the country's characteristic political and religious organisation was in the main preserved, the pharaohs that ruled Egypt during the centuries of its decline are on the whole rather anonymous figures, not leaving painted tombs behind them like those on the West Bank of the Nile at Luxor and often ruling for short periods and over only parts of the country.

However, as a current exhibition at the musée Jacquemart-André in Paris reveals, the thousand years or so of ancient Egypt's late period also gave rise to a late style, notably of characteristic ancient Egyptian forms of art such as sculpture, which introduced many intriguing new innovations while continuing in the traditions laid down by the ancestors of the period's artists and artisans.

Numbers of visitors to the Queensland Museum are expected to swell significantly when a new exhibition from the British Museums Egyptology collection opens to the public on Thursday.

The well preserved mummies, sarcophagi and statues await eager eyes and fascinated history buffs to view the thousands of year old antiquities in their humidity controlled glass houses in the exhibition - Mummy: Secrets of the Tomb.

But the question of why we continue to be intrigued by this ancient culture remains.

Assistant Keeper in the department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum and curator of the exhibition John Taylor says part of the allure is because their culture was so carefully preserved.

"You can get a really, really comprehensive view of what life was like 3000 years ago.

"What this reveals to the public is really how the Egyptians would make their way into the next life. This is the technology they used, the magic that they thought they could activate to get them to eternal life.

Centuries of history are scattered throughout Alexandria’s streets, but many of its greatest treasures are buried beneath them, or are submerged underwater. While a vivid imagination is needed to appreciate the city’s former glory, there are still plenty of physical sites on offer to whet the appetite.

Alexandria deserves to have more than just one day dedicated to exploring its history and charms, but a fleeting visit is certainly possible.

The main train station is a great place to start, especially for those making their way from Cairo on an early morning train. Tickets for the 2.5 hour journey should cost between 25-52 LE depending on the type of train and class of carriage.

A short walk from the station leads to the marble-terraced Roman Amphitheatre which was built in the 2nd Century AD and is a one-of-a-kind in Egypt. It was discovered while building the foundations for apartment buildings, and there are still excavations being made.

A century has passed since the bust of Nefertiti was discovered in Tel Al-Amarna, near Minya. Eleven years after the discovery a debate over its legitimate ownership erupted, and that debate is still going on. The Germans say that they acquired it legally, whereas the Egyptians maintain that the legalities were fraught with foul play.

Since the Nefertiti bust went into display in Berlin in 1923, researchers and politicians have been arguing about the manner in which this exquisite piece of ancient art left Egypt, and the possible duplicitous involvement in its acquisition by the Germans.

For many people, the Nefertiti bust is the cause celebre for all the stolen treasures of antiquity, for all the invaluable pieces of art that crossed borders in dubious circumstances, and for the numerous campaigns made for their restitution to their places of origin.

It is more than 50 years since Alan Moorehead wrote The White Nile, his magisterial study of efforts to find the source of the great river that rises in the lakes of central Africa and flows down through the swamps of southern Sudan to bring life to the cotton fields of Egypt, before reaching the Mediterranean.

Having written biographies of David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley, two of the quintet of great Victorian explorers of the Nile (the others being John Hanning Speke, Richard Burton and Samuel Baker), Tim Jeal is well placed to bring this story up to date.

While mindful of some of the absurdities and cruelties of their missions, Jeal is refreshingly sympathetic to the anti-slavery ideals of men such as Livingstone, as well as to the old-fashioned romanticism of Burton and Speke – before such qualities were overtaken by more political and commercial considerations in the age of late Victorian imperialism.

An archaeological committee from the Ministry of State for Antiquities (MSA) embarked today on an inspection tour at the El-Hibeh archaeological site in Beni Suef, as well as other sites that were subjected to looting after the 2011 revolution.

Abdel-Hamid Maarouf, head of the ancient Egyptian antiquities department and head of the committee, told Ahram Online that the tour includes the El-Hibeh and Ehnasia sites in Beni Suef and Dahshour in Giza. The committee aims to check the losses as well as tighten security measures at the sites.

On 25 March, Ahram Online published an article about a new Facebook page launched by well-known American archeologist Carol Redmount, which aimed to rescue the El-Hibeh archaeological site. The site is considered to be crucial for understanding ancient Egyptian history, as it is the least disturbed city mound from the third intermediate period (1070BC - 664BC).

Egyptian archaeologists have discovered four Greek and Byzantine-era rock tombs in a section of old Alexandria's eastern necropolis in an area neighbouring Al-Ibrahimeya tunnel. 

The site was discovered during excavations carried out by the Ministry of State for Antiquities (MSA) and stretches between the areas of Al-Shatbi and Mostafa Kamel.

Excavations uncovered four rock-hewn Greek and Byzantine tombs containing a collection of funerary pots, perfume containers and lamps.

MSA minister Mohamed Ibrahim stated that the aim of the excavations was to inspect the area for archaeological artefacts before declaring it free for residential building.

“It is a very important discovery that adds more detail to the archaeological map of Alexandria,” Ibrahim told Ahram Online.

Researchers believe they have found evidence of real natural disasters on which the ten plagues of Egypt, which led to Moses freeing the Israelites from slavery in the Book of Exodus in the Bible, were based.

But rather than explaining them as the wrathful act of a vengeful God, the scientists claim the plagues can be attributed to a chain of natural phenomena triggered by changes in the climate and environmental disasters that happened hundreds of miles away.

They have compiled compelling evidence that offers new explanations for the Biblical plagues, which will be outlined in a new series to be broadcast on the National Geographical Channel on Easter Sunday.

Archaeologists now widely believe the plagues occurred at an ancient city of Pi-Rameses on the Nile Delta, which was the capital of Egypt during the reign of Pharaoh Rameses the Second, who ruled between 1279BC and 1213BC. 

Two thousand years ago, an Egyptian purchased a mummified kitten from a breeder, to offer as a sacrifice to the goddess Bastet, new research suggests.

Between about 332 B.C. and 30 B.C. in Egypt, cats were bred near temples specifically to be mummified and used as offerings.

The cat mummy came from the Egyptian Collection of the National Archeological Museum in Parma, Italy. It was bought by the museum in the 18th century from a collector. Because of how the museum acquired it, there's no documentation about where the mummy came from.

The cat mummies from this period are common, especially kittens. "Kittens, aged 2 to 4 months old, were sacrificed in huge numbers, because they were more suitable for mummification," the authors write in the paper, published in the April 2012 issue of the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery.

The researchers did a radiograph — similar to an X-ray — of the mummy, to see under the wrappings, finding the small cat was actually a kitten, only about 5 or 6 months old.

"The fact that the cat was young suggests that it was one of those bred specifically for mummification," study researcher Giacomo Gnudi, a professor at the University of Parma, said in a statement.

After six months of feasibility studies, the library at St. Catherine's Monastery in the southern Sinai Peninsula will be restored and developed to meet international standards.

According to Minister of State for Antiquities Mohamed Ibrahim, the project will be implemented in two phases and will include the restoration of the library's eastern and western sections.

The library contains some 3,500 manuscripts in the Greco-Roman, Coptic, Arabic, Hebrew, Georgian, Syrian, Armenian and Udi languages, as well as numerous rare icons and other liturgical objects. It also houses a collection of decrees and regulations issued by the Muslim Caliph of the time, intended to ensure the security of the monastery's Christian population.

The restoration project is being financed by the monastery and carried out under the supervision of the Ministry of State for Antiquities (MSA).

Today it's our turn, Rosa and Mark, to write the diary. For the last two weeks, we have been working on the southern looted tombs, sifting through the spoil left behind by the looters in order to recover human remains and any other associated funerary artefacts that they left behind. In this case, it was plenty of the former, but not so much of the latter. Although within two hours of starting work we had recovered a painted shroud complete with hieroglyphs - not bad for the first day! (More on that later, post SCA report).

There were two main looted tombs, but the remnants of the looting had been spread over a much wider area, and every time we looked in a new area we found more human remains. Despite this, we painstakingly sieved our way through all of the spoil and recovered both intact and fragmented bones, including two complete skulls and several leg bones. However, we always seemed to be finding the left leg bones, which could lead to some interesting reconstructions.

Part of the fun of working with the human remains was trying to explain to the workmen, as well as our Egyptian colleagues, where each bone we found was situated in the body. 

“Small beer – a very little diary account, full of odd doings and happenings”.

Archaeological surveyors are, by their very nature, the watchers within any expedition. A surveyor with ethnographic interests and access to a camera is a troublesome sort indeed. Snatches of time between recording the location of small finds, providing heights for the excavation trenches and mapping the distribution of tombs in the southern part of the site, afforded moments to observe the GHPP team at work; long, lonely walks to the peripheries of the site, scouting out possible locations for new control points, the perfect space in which to consider the quirks of our little GHPP sub-culture.

The 1st of April was notable not only for being Ole’s birthday and the day on which the site was accosted by the sandstorm, but also for the unofficial arrival of unofficial visitors - people we had not encountered on the site before. Strangers! Before lunch, when the weather was vexing us with sporadic sandstormlings, I spotted at the western edge of our site a pristine white 4 x 4, the condition of which immediately alerted me that these were not archaeologists. A few seconds later figures emerged from the vehicle; my spidey surveying senses tingled. At a good distance away my eyes could make out two GPS antennae: one mounted on a handheld antenna, the other on the roof of the car. There is nothing quite like spotting other surveyors in the field to make one excitable – particularly ones working in Egypt, with super-awesome geomatic kit.

After a full day off writing reports, packing and washing on Friday, The time came once again to close up the site on Saturday 7th and prepare to head to our various homes. On Saturday morning we headed up to Quesna a little earlier than usual to leave ourselves plenty of time for re-organising our storage magazine. There were still boxes to be moved, final finds to be registered and then the official closing of the season!  Photographs were also taken, including those of the just completed ceramic coffins! We were lucky to have a couple of our workers with us once again to help move everything!Everything was completed by 11.30am and we then headed down to Quesna railway station to see Tass and Am Yasseen off - Tass to Cairo and Am Yasseen back to Quft.

Prosecutors said the funeral mask of Lady Ka-Nefer-Nefer went missing from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo about 40 years ago and that it should be returned to its country of origin. The St. Louis Art Museum said it researched the provenance of the mask and legitimately purchased it in 1998 from a New York art dealer.

US District Judge Henry Autry in St Louis sided with the museum.

The US government “does not provide a factual statement of theft, smuggling or clandestine importation,” Autry wrote in the 31 March ruling.

“The Government cannot simply rest on its laurels and believe that it can initiate a civil forfeiture proceeding on the basis of one bold assertion that because something went missing from one party in 1973 and turned up with another party in 1998, it was therefore stolen and/or imported or exported illegally,” the judge wrote.

A message left with Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities was not returned.

In many ways the art of dynastic Egypt brought nature to a standstill, freezing the figure in an elegant, quietly pulsing suspended animation. Especially in its grandest, most monumental expression — the eerie, somnolent statues of the gods and of the pharaohs who were their earthly junior-god emissaries — Egypt offers us the sleekest, longest-running style in the history of art. It is also probably as instantly recognizable and firmly imprinted on human consciousness as any we know.

This style’s consistency is, if you think about it, frightening. It bespeaks an authoritarian power that was consolidated under the first Pharaoh around 3100 B.C., and that, despite political ups and downs, maintained a firm grip on the country’s aesthetic program for nearly three millenniums. The duration of Egyptian art may dull curiosity about how it began, since it is hard imagining a time when it didn’t exist. But of course everything starts somewhere: the high Egyptian style did not spring fully formed from the forehead of Osiris, god of the afterlife.

This is demonstrated by “The Dawn of Egyptian Art,” a sublime, view-shifting exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art dominated foremost by small, startlingly personable sculptures and vessels from around 3900 to 2649 B.C. The show’s around 190 objects include animal sculptures and figures carved in wood, ivory and stone or modeled in clay; ceramic vessels painted with boats and their regal occupants.  

Among the celebrated masterpieces of the collection are the Cartonage belonging to the Lady of the House of Djed-Montu-iues-anj (XXII dynasty); the partially reproduced Tomb of Nakht, the Scribe-Astronomer of Amun (XVIII dynasty) and the painted funerary masks (from the first century BC).

Under the title "Fashion and Beauty in Ancient Egypt" the current temporary exhibition includes pieces from museums in Bologna, Turin, Florence and Lyon. Elvira D’Amicone, the exhibition’s curator, sure has a good sense of gender balance: not only is women’s fashion on show, but also that of men and even infants. The 4500 year-old sandals of a young kid attest to ancient Egyptian artisanship. The sandals, discovered near Luxor, were preserved for his afterlife.

 At another corner of the exhibition hall, one comes face-to-face with a very rare example of Pharaonic fashion; absolutely one of a kind - or, to be precise, one of twenty such pieces worldwide). A spectacular dress made of beads in a fishnet pattern. 

The level of Nile water has been measured for 5000 years to predict farming production. This current Nilometer, or Miqias in Arabic, on the southern tip of Roda Island dates back to 715 AD making it one of Cairo’s oldest sites in relatively good shape but also it is the second oldest building by the Ummayyads (Arab/Muslim) dynasty.

The Nilometer is essentially a measuring device, one big enough to be entered to occupy its interior space. The device consists of a central column with measuring markings of cubits (roughly the size of a forearm) and smaller units which are roughly the width of a finger. Although the original structure was restored in 815 AD it was destroyed in 850 AD by a flood. This has resulted in the addition of several chambers for the water to enter through before making it to the measuring hall (this would slow down the force of the water so that it isn’t destructive). Another addition to the structure following its 850 destruction was a carved wooden beam that supports the top of the column which had been free standing. Also a column capital was added. The current incarnation of the Nilometer was designed by Abu’l ‘Abbas Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Kathir al-Farqhani from Farghana, known in the West as the astronomer Alfraganus.